Archive for May, 2008

Marketing Performance Management

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Marketing consists of spotting the needs of customers and meeting them in the best possible manner. Marketing research plays a key role in this process. Starting with marketing measurement, marketing research helps the firm in every component of the total marketing task. It helps the firm acquire a better understanding of the consumer, the competition and the marketing environment. It also aids the formulation of the marketing mix. Decisions on each element of the marketing mix, product, distribution, promotion and pricing need marketing research support.

With the ever-increasing complexity of marketing and business activity, marketing research has also grown in complexity. Today, carrying out research relating to customers, products and markets requires specialized skills and sophisticated techniques. And marketing research has emerged as a highly specialized function of marketing management.

Marketing research is the systematic, objective and exhaustive search for and study of the facts relating to any problem in the field of marketing. Research on product includes studies on the competitive position of a product/ brand. Consumer research includes studies on consumer behavior and buyer motives.

In applying marketing research for solving any marketing problem, the researcher has to go through several steps or stages. Each stage has its own decisive role in the total research process. Right from defining the problem down to the preparation of the report, the researcher has to proceed step by step, like a scientist in a laboratory. Defining the marketing problem to be tackled and identifying the market research problem involved in the task is the first thing followed by specifying the information requirement.

If the definition of the problem is faulty, the research results will be misleading and confusing. For example, a problem of poor profits may sometimes be understood wrongly as a problem of inadequate sales. Apart from defining the problem correctly, it is also essential to analyze the problem in depth.

Article Source: ezinearticles.com/?Marketing-Performance-Management&id=200393

Email Marketing - 2 Ways to Make Money With Email Marketing

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Email Marketing is one of my favorite ways to make money online – in fact in a lot of ways, it is the only way I make money online. Sure, people buy things from my sales pages, but they get to my sales pages via my email marketing.

I use article marketing to drive qualified traffic to my web site, then I use squeeze pages to drive the traffic to my email marketing campaign. Next, I use my email marketing campaign to drive traffic to my sales pages – on a regular basis, day in and day out, I can drive traffic to my sales pages.

Do I want an extra 1000 visitors today? I simply mail an email or two. That’s it. With email marketing I can literally dial up my visitor count.

But to do that, you have to first build the email list. And that takes time to do – but you really have to do it (in email marketing we call that list building).

So what are the 2 ways to make money with email marketing?

1) Drive traffic to your sales pages.

2) Drive traffic to affiliate pages

You see, in making money with email marketing, the biggest thing is driving traffic. Sure, I have to have a great product, or I have to have an affiliation with a great affiliate company, but I have to drive traffic to my pages – and email marketing is the fuel that does that for me.

Article Source: ezinearticles.com/?Email-Marketing—2-Ways-to-Make-Money-With-Email-Marketing&id=522846

Internet Marketing For Small Businesses

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Business history has an abundance of instances of business failures on account of lack of proper marketing planning. It is extremely important in the case of Internet marketing to plan marketing strategies properly. Marketing planning provides the framework for all business decisions of an enterprise – decisions on markets, decisions on products and decisions on manufacturing facilities, investments and organizational structure.

Marketing planning is the interface between the enterprise and its market/customers. Internet marketing places the consumer at both the beginning and the end of the business process and that any firm practicing marketing in the proper sense has to identify correctly the needs of the consumer, translate the needs into suitable products and services, deliver those products and services to the total satisfaction of the consumer and through this process generate profits for the firm.

Marketing planning is the instrument through which all these tasks get accomplished. The quality of marketing planning is revealed in the success of all marketing activities. Obviously, considerable thought, expertise and effort have to go into the process of marketing planning.

The marketing planner first scans the environment followed by an internal scanning of his unit, its strength and weaknesses and assesses to what extent his marketing organization is equipped to pursue the various opportunities emerging in the environment. Then he formulates the marketing objectives and marketing strategies. And finally, he formulates the detailed functional plans in each aspect of the total marketing task.

As the first step in the marketing planning process, the firm scans its marketing environment. The main purpose of this exercise is to find out the favorable and unfavorable factors prevailing in the environment and the specific business opportunities available to the business unit and their relative attractiveness. In the case of marketing planning, environmental scanning focuses on the environment of the business unit in question and its scope is limited to the business in question.

Article Source: ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Marketing-For-Small-Businesses&id=195541